We are looking for Howard Kestenbaum. He was on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center South Tower (the second building that was hit). If you have any information please contact me.

How long will messages like this be on-line, a constant reminder of the turmoil of those blue September days? Howard Kestenbaum worked at the top of the south tower, the second to be struck. In the midst of chaos, his was a voice of calm and reason in the 78th floor sky lobby as people waited anxiously for the express elevators that were to take them to the ground floor. They could not know about United Airlines Flight 175, just minutes away from impact.

Wein and Singer joined three of their Aon colleagues: Richard Gabrielle, 50, Vijay Paramsothy, 23, and the group’s boss, Howard Kestenbaum, 56.

Two elevators in the north half of the lobby were out of service, but Wein’s group stood near one of the idle cars anyway; it was less crowded there than at the south end of the lobby.

I’ve left my purse, Wein recalls saying. I don’t want to go back up, but how will I get the bus?

“Here, take some money and go home,” Kestenbaum said.

Singer remembered something she had left at her desk.

No, Kestenbaum said. Don’t go back up. They stayed in the lobby.

Howard’s last moments were spent taking care of those around him. The College has done a fine job of memorializing Lindsay Morehouse, creating an award for the player at the New England Championship “who best displays the ideals of sportsmanship, friendliness, character, fair play, and hard work that Lindsay embodied until her untimely death 9-11-2001.”

Kestenbaum was an athlete and wrestler at Williams. The College should honor him in a similar fashion. With luck, the class of 1967 is working on something in conjunction with the planning for its 40th reunion.

And then the second plane hit.

A deafening explosion and a searing blast of heat ripped through the lobby. The air turned black with smoke. Flames burst out of elevators. Walls and the ceiling crumbled into a foot of debris on the floor. Shards of glass flew like thrown knives.

The blast threw people like dolls, tearing their bodies apart.

…

“Howard!” Judy Wein was yelling to Kestenbaum, her boss.

It was Vijay Paramsothy who called back: “We’re over here!”

Paramsothy was sitting up, scratched and bloody. Marble slabs had fallen onto Richard Gabrielle and broken his legs. Wein tried to move the slabs with her good arm, and he cried out.

Howard Kestenbaum lay flat and still. To Wein, he looked peaceful.

Dead and wounded covered the floor of the lobby like a battlefield after cannon fire. A ghostly dusting of plaster lay over everyone.

Howard Kestenbaum was, like me, a Ph.D., a builder of models, a quant operating in the rarefied world of risk analysis. Yet only a modeller can know that models don’t really matter, that who we are and what we have done is much more to be found in the families we cherish than in the money we make.

From the very beginning — when he accidentally fell on her at a party in the West Village — he made her laugh. He walked her home that night but, amusing or not, she wouldn’t give him her phone number.

A few days later, however, she picked up the phone to hear someone say it was “Howie.” Not recognizing his voice, she asked: “Howie who?”

“Fine, thank you, and how are you?” Howie Kestenbaum replied.

For 31 years of marriage, Howard and Granvilette Kestenbaum of Montclair talked every day, and he always made her laugh.

Howard was a really good man. That may seem an ordinary epithet, but Howard thought of himself as an ordinary man — an ordinary husband, an ordinary father and an ordinary friend… He loved and cared for his family, helped friends, visited with the homeless, lonely and infirmed. His modesty and leprechaun smile belied how quiet and graceful, without fanfare, the shining spirit of an extraordinary good man can touch and transform others. He would have been surprised that anyone noticed him, for that is not what he sought. And that is why we who love him are so honored to have known him, if only for a moment.

Thirty one years of marriage and family, of trials and triumphs, does indeed seem like only a moment. May we all live our moments as well as Howard Kestenbaum lived his.

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5 Responses to “Only For A Moment”

Frank Fernandez says:

In the neighborhood where I live in Brooklyn we may have lost up to 150 people on September 11. Today is a very sad day for me and my prayers are with our armed forces bravely fighting a war on two fronts. People may truly believe we should not have gone into Iraq,I being one of them, but when that fight attracts people (Terrorists) who are hellbent on destroying our way of life, the only option is to win and not to whine and run. W Fanatics only waver when they are met with overpowering force and the will of the American people to see this fight to the finish. For those who love to equate Iraq with Vietnam we had an all to visible Gulf of Tonkin here in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania.

A better reporting of Bob’s comment to me last night, minus expletive language, would have been “You’re one of the lucky ones; you’re still here.” Bob pointed me towards life and duty.

A half-hour later, a woman who grep up in South Africa engaged me on the three “Portraits of Grief” you passed on. As she talked and related her own stories of loss, she asked, “What would they want you to do? How would they want you to live?”

For me, the answers I found were in the narratives themselves– in Lindsay’s smile and demeanor, in Howard’s making his wife laugh, in Brian’s wonderful question “Where are my girls?” Each of these brief portraits seems to me a powerful role model– a call to what we, to what I, may be and achieve. And of what may live on– what must live on.

When Mark Taylor told me his own story of his father’s death, he reminded me that one of the lessons he taught was that a great part of living is listening to the voices of the dead. Well would I live up to any of these examples.

Well would we memoralize each of these fallen, remembering what they were, and, we still living, hear their voices and take their life up anew.

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[…] Boston is as blue today as on that awful morning 7 years ago when the planes took off from Logan. Howard Kestenbaum ‘67, Brian Murphy ‘80 and Lindsay Morehouse ‘00 will never again enjoy an Indian summer […]

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